walkingdork said:
Monolithium said:
darth_ender said:
As Warbler says, you can swing your arm all you want as long as you don't hit someone else. Abortion, to me, hits the unborn child in the face. Your free will should not extend so far as to reduce that of someone else's.
Until it is separated from the Mother, it doesn't get individual rights.
word.
Anti-word.
An assertion is not an argument and answers no argument.
Some of the assertions made in the abortion debate have some component of truth. Which is why they have a superficial charm and will be repeated.
Mono is correct that fetuses do not have the rights guaranteed to individuals (as under our Constitution). While corporations are given legal personhood, fetuses are not. Food for thought.
That does not mean that the law can or should disregard the fetus, which is the intended implication of the assertion. I've expressed the view that I don't know exactly where the legal lines can always be drawn. But I lean in the direction of drawing them to protect human life. To me, abortion should be a legal exception, not a legal rule.
ender makes the good point that
Rights are simply what we as a society define as morally correct and not. Somehow abortion advocates believe that these rights do not come till birth or 20 weeks gestation or whatever. I believe that these rights are inherent to all, regardless of their development.
As in that other discussion, morality and law are not always (or even usually) perfectly in sync - and that's okay - but I think morality should be a motivating part of the law. If a person doesn't recognize the moral value of a developing human, I don't know how to convince them.
It does get tricky if we say there are individual rights for developing humans because many of us accept there are situations where termination of pregnancy should be allowed. If a woman's life is on the line, does she need a judge to sign off? What if a judge decides - against the doctor's advice - that the likelihood of harm and death to the mother is insufficient? Is Plan B a violation of an embryo's rights or is it more like a condom?
What about cases of conjoined twins, where separation is likely or certain to kill one of those individuals? I don't think anyone will deny that conjoined twins have individual rights. In that foreign case, a court decided - against the parents' wishes - that the twins were to be separated (because they would both otherwise die). The parents wanted to let nature takes its course rather than choose to kill one of their children. Should the courts have had no say? If so, what about the rights of one or both children? How were the rights of the killed child respected? These are not easy questions, even where we recognize individual rights.
I ultimately agree with ender, even if there are not individual rights in an absolute or constitutional sense, we do recognize a concept that animals have a semblance of rights and we should do the same for developing humans.